"...But the little beauty 'Backsight' by Daniel A Rabuzzi deserves special mention from me. I read a lot of poetry and I know it is pretty hard to write good, really good, speculative/sci-fi/fantasy poems. The poems in Sybil’s Garage No. 6 are the kind that linger long after they are read."

"...It’s clear from the start of the story that the deconstructor is at least slightly mad, and both her madness and loneliness, as well as her manic joy in the birds, are conveyed through rich and formal language. The details of her workshop­the ignored insects, the broken gears and ancient filing cabinets­give a sense of great age and neglect, which feed into the deconstructor’s moments of intense and acknowledged loneliness. Most of the time, that loneliness remains unacknowledged, as though the deconstructor has had to draw away from it in order to function. This is an effective way to convey the depth of that loneliness, as the short passages in which the deconstructor absentmindedly digs for tools in her smock are effective indications of her disconnectedness from the reality surrounding her. While the ending is not exactly unexpected, it is poignant and lingering."

Lois Tilton's March Short Fiction reviews for The Internet Review of Science Fiction

"An old woman lives alone on an island. In her persona as the constructor she makes life-like mechanical birds, which her alternate persona, the deconstructor, tests and dismantles when they fail to fly­an unending daily cycle of creation and recreation.

The old woman seems in many ways to be a senile Gaia, creator of all the world's creatures, including those she has forgotten. But her role here is that of Daedalus, imprisoned in his tower, except that instead of flying away herself, the old woman wants her birds to fly back home to her, bringing their children. Recreating, perhaps, drowned Icarus?

The story is enigmatic, but full of wonderful images of the cluttered, disordered workroom:

'Books were piled, strewn and mounded on the table. The deconstructor plunged in. Dust and downy feathers erupted into the rays of morning sun. Coughing, the deconstructor yanked out a volume, flipped it open, read in two places, harrumphed, and tossed the book back.'

The images in this piece are created only from words, but I consider them the most successful ones in this issue."